Lumia 620: Design and build

The Lumia is a small but chunky handset. Laid flat next to the iPhone 5 and BlackBerry Z10 it looks small, but thick, and 127 grammes is heavy for a phone with a 3.8-inch display.

It wears its inexpensive Windows Phone credentials on its sleeves. It comes in a range of cheery bright colours, with a selection of coloured cases that you can remove and swap.

One benefit of the removable cover is the ability to change the battery. You can also add in a MicroSD card and change out the SIM this way.

Look to the thick but curvy and smooth sides of the Lumia 620 and you'll find camera, power and volume buttons. These feel a little cheap, and the response is spongey. At the top is a 3.5mm jack, and the smooth back cover is broken only by a Nokia logo, the rear-facing camera and a tiny speaker.

Lumia 620: Hardware and display

The Lumia comes with a 3.8 inch, TFT touchscreen with a respectable resolution of 800 by 480 and a pixel density of 246 pixels per inch. Windows Phone 8 looks great, with decent colour and detail even under natural light. The touchsreen is responsive, but we found the onscreen keyboard irritatingly small to use.

The Lumia 620 is powered by a dual-core processor and 512 megabytes of RAM. You get 8GB of internal storage and an microSD card slot.

Connectivity includes NFC, USB and Wi-Fi, but there's no 4G.

Lumia 620: Performance

General performance is noticeably more sluggish when compared directly to more expensive Windows phones. We found ourselves occassionally waiting a split second for transitions and animations to resolve when browsing around.

We measure Javascript performance using the SunSpider test. In this the Lumia 620 was noticably slower than its more expensive brethren the Lumia 820 and 920. The similarly priced HTC Windows Phone 8S socred slightly quicker here, too.

Lumia 620: Software and battery

The Lumia 620 includes the usual range of Nokia-exclusive apps, including Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia City Lens and Nokia Music. And then there's Windows Phone 8, of course.

The Lumia 620's battery is small, but so is the screen and the processor is not speedy. We found that on a full charge you can get you a day using the Lumia 620 and still have a bit of juice left. And, of course, you can carry a spare battery.

Lumia 620: Cameras

The Nokia Lumia 620 has a 5 megapixel rear-facing camera. There are scene modes; a range of user adjustable settings including White Balance, ISO and exposure; and automatic features such as autofocus and flash, as well as Nokia's software 'lenses' from which to select.

We found images we took were okay - lacking a little detail around the edges and with slightly faded looking colours, but okay.

The video camera is capable of shooting in 720p.

Lumia 620: Verdict

A solid and inexpensive Windows Phone, we give the Lumia 620 3.5 stars.